An Efficient Bit Stream Instruction-set for Network Packet Processing Applications

This paper proposes a new set of instructions to improve the packet processing capacity of a network processor. The proposed set of instructions is able to achieve more efficient packet processing by accelerating integration of packet headers. Furthermore, a hardware configuration dedicated to processing overlay instructions was designed to reduce additional hardware cost. For this purpose, the basic architecture for the network processor was designed using LISA and the overlay block was optimized based on the barrel shifter. The block was synthesized to compare the area and the operation delay, and allocated to a C-level macro function using the compiler known function (CKF). The improvement in performance was confirmed by comparing the execution cycle and the execution time of an application program. Experiments were conducted using the processor designer and the compiler designer from Coware. The result of synthesis with the TSMC () from Synopsys indicated a reduction in operation delay by 20.7% and an improvement in performance of 30.8% with the proposed set of instructions for the entire execution cycle.